My Final Post: Good News!
Hello all! After an exciting and nerve racking summer, I can officially announce that I am now full time staff at James Monroe’s Highland as their Communications and Events Coordinator! I applied on my third day as an intern at the urging of some of the staff, I interviewed about a month ago, and I started full time earlier this week. With my first week now in the books, I’m so grateful for all the doors that IPH has opened for me.
But before I started this position, I finished (most of) my internship by renewing some of our loans. Like I’ve mentioned in my last posts, most of these items hasn’t been renewed in several years and needed to legally be resigned. One of my favorite loan stories was when I called the man who had lent us a huge (I mean **huge**) loom in 1997. We had no paper file or any information on the loan other than this man’s phone number. When I called him, he said he now wanted the loom we’d had for 20 years back by the end of the week! Part of my job now at Highland is finalizing the return and cleaning the loom.
I also worked with our executive director very closely to better understand the loans we have with the James Monroe Museum. Based on an agreement she signed with the museum in 2016, it appeared that we had about 30 of their items. In reality, we returned about half of those during the early 2000′s when documentation at the museum was poor. We were able to draft a new agreement between the two museum that more accurately reflected what we actually had on loan based on my research.
Finally, this week was the Albemarle County fair at Highland! Between the sheep, the cows, and the Carpe Donut donuts, it was quite the exciting first week. I’ll continue to go on more wedding tours, walkthroughs and planning meetings next week to learn more about my position.
I just wanted to thank the IPH program again for the opportunity it gave it for a full time job. While I know this is always the ideal situation, it seemed pretty unlikely when I first started. I’m so thankful for the program for giving me a foot in the door that I otherwise would not have had.